Overview

• Two space telescopes, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) and the agency's Chandra X-ray Observatory, observed a giant black hole, named UHZ1, that has a mass approximately equal to the galaxy that hosts it. This galaxy existed just 470 million years after the Big Bang.
• UHZ1 is the most distant black hole yet observed in X-rays and its stage of growth gives scientists insight on how such objects formed.
• Judging by the brightness and intensity of the X-rays, which are connected to the strength of the black hole's gravity, the black hole has a mass of the order of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of solar masses, equivalent to the mass of its host galaxy.
• Models on how supermassive black holes form offer two main theories. One states they formed through rapid mergers of stellar-mass black holes produced by exploding stars. The other posits that they formed directly from a collapsing gas cloud that had a mass between 10,000 and 100,000 times that of the sun. This discovery suggests that the newfound black hole was born large, indicating the latter theory.
• This discovery challenges the 'small seed' scenario where supermassive black holes grow from stellar-mass seeds. The direct collapse of gas to form large "seed" black holes, that are at least tens-of-thousands of solar masses and independent of any stars that form, may instead be the process.